Sunday, September 13, 2009

Widespread Media Distortion About Tea Parties

The Democratic Party's propaganda machine concertedly failed to cover yesterday's two million strong tea party. Much like Big Brother in George Orwell's book 1984, the propaganda machine paints the centrist tea party demonstrators as "extremist" and the extremists in Congress as "centrists".

There is little reason to continue to watch, pay attention to or care about the "news" as presented by Democratic Party organs. Fox is no better because it is a Progressive Republican mirror.

In the current issue of Reason Magazine Jesse Walker has an excellent article on the Democrats' and Rockefeller Republicans' use of allegations of "extremism" to aim to suppress the speech of moderates who disagree with them. Extremists in the media and in Congress have been using allegations of "right wing violence" to sustain proposals to suppress views that diverge from "progressivism". One extremist, writing in one of the "progressive" organs, has called for bans on "hate speech", in other words for a program to transfer the authoritarian policies of politically correct universities to the nation at large.

When the left was subjected to Palmer Raids and McCarthyism in the early to mid twentieth century (and labor leaders were convicted of violence in the late 19th century) the left claimed to support freedom of speech. Now that left-wing extremism has come to dominate American political discussion, the left, as it generally has wherever it has come to power, favors violent suppression of speech with which it disagrees.

Walker makes an excellent point:

"We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center."

I would, though, take issue with Walker's depiction of the current power elite as representing a "center". American politics is divided among several disparate points of view, and there is no longer a viewpoint that can be called center, any more than there is a "center" between alligators and elephants. A creature that is part alligator and part elephant is not a midpoint between the two, rather it is an absurdity, and there is likewise no midpoint between those who believe in state suppression and those who believe in freedom.

Walker quotes Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in which he argued that right wing extremists adopted the practices of left-wing extremists. Hofstadter wrote:

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him...The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups..."

In the same way, the "progressive" left, now that it has power, can be expected to emulate the fascist suppression that it has long claimed to oppose by accusing moderate Americans who believe in freedom of "extremism".

Walker reviews the history of labor leader Walter Reuther's urging the Kennedy administration to use the FBI to politically attack the right. In other words, today's dominant "progressives" mirror the authoritarian right; and the authoritarian right has often reflected the views of "progressives". Neither is "moderate".

In fact, the only moderates are those millions who demonstrated in the tea party rally yesterday, the same people that the propaganda outlets aim to marginalize, demonize and accuse of extremism.

One of the fascinating points in the essay is Walker's remark that Kenneth Stern, author of the tendentious Force Upon the Plain argues that all who advocate decentralization are racists. Then, it would seem that all advocates of modern management theory are racists since decentralization is fundamental to it.

Stern typifies the thuggish, authoritarian tendencies in American progressivism. He argues that anyone who does not want to obey centralized authority is "objectionable." Walker quotes one of Stern's particularly ugly passages:

"When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, 'Let me do it my own way,' it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed."

Walker notes that Timothy McVeigh's extremist violence made it possible for the Clinton White House to turn the tables on the Gingrich Congress. This is similar to concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare: public sympathy is a potent weapon. Indeed, in labor history public opinion typically went to the victims of violence. Thus, if a labor union committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to management while if management committed acts of violence the public became sympathetic to labor. This was the case in the 1920s following the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike in which a number of workers' children were burned to death by Pinkerton guards employed by the Rockefeller owned firm, CF&I.

Conservatives are well counseled to keep violent rhetoric out of the debate. That is, until the point where a revolution is necessary. This was John Locke's argument. While individual rights are sacrosanct and the state is a thuggish institution that violates them, the right to defense needs to be tempered by political reality.

The Obama administration leaped at the opportunity to use federal government apparatchiks in the Department of Homeland Security to issue a report about "right wing extremism". Naturally, the state is itself reflective of extremism, not the right wingers, and one can predict an effort by Congressional and federal thugs to institute violent action against Americans with whom they disagree. Walker describes an "infamous dossier produced by the Missouri Information Analysis Center devoted to...the militia movement" that said "it is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr."

Hence, the Obama administration already engages in incipient totalitarianism. The reasoning the left uses to support state suppression (that those who disagree with Obama fuel the motives of murderers) is so circuitous that it is evident that their agenda is to silence the speech of any who disagree with their incompetent economic ideas, their mean-spirited stealing in the name of "equality" and the inevitable redistribution of wealth from those who work and are ambitious to Nacy Pelosi-Mussolini, George Soros and their welfare-recipient clients.

Overall, Walker's article is sensational. If you don't subscribe to Reason I urge you to do so. If you're still reading Democratic Party propaganda and not supporting the information sources that agree with you you are part of the problem, not the solution (to project a left-wing phrase).

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.